PISA 2025 report — Spain and the role of digital devices in the classroom

Report profile

PISA 2025 (Programme for International Student Assessment) is the international educational assessment carried out by the OECD every three years among 15-year-old students. The 2025 edition once again measures classroom distraction from digital devices — this time in Science — as a variable associated with academic performance, following a comparable indicator that started in Mathematics in the 2022 edition.

• Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
• Scope: international comparison by country, with a breakdown by autonomous region in Spain’s case.
• Methodological continuity: measurement of distraction from digital devices, now in Science class (in 2022 it was Mathematics).

Spain’s results: nominal lows

Spain reached, in the PISA 2025 report, some of the lowest nominal scores since it started participating in this assessment (year 2000): 477 points in Science, 451 in Reading and 457 in Mathematics. All three scores are lower than in 2022, although in Science that difference is not statistically significant — the clear and statistically significant drop is in Reading and Mathematics. Since 2015, Spain has lost 45 points in Reading and close to 30 in Mathematics.

Digital distraction, measured with data

The report offers a concrete clue about one of the factors associated with performance, not a demonstrated cause: 28% of students across OECD countries say their classmates get distracted using digital devices in most or all Science classes — in Spain it is 29% — and that distraction is associated with worse performance in more than two-thirds of the education systems assessed.

Asturias: leading in Reading, with caveats

Asturias has the highest score in Spain in Reading among regions with comparable results, with 471 points — twenty above the Spanish average — plus 492 in Science, 469 in Mathematics, and leading Environmental Science with 495 points. The Asturian sample (1,798 students from 56 schools) had an exclusion rate of 2.07%, within PISA standards — unlike the Catalan case (see the related article for that detail). Asturias also loses ground compared with 2022 (26 points less in Reading, 26 in Mathematics and 11 in Science), so relative leadership coexists with a real absolute decline.